How to make appraisals result driven?

Most employees are familiar with their organization’s vision and values. It’s common practice for management to define these to represent the organization’s ethos – what they do and why – and set a forward-looking goal about what they are trying to achieve.  One such aspect that ties in with the culture and ethos is an appraisal. Every employee considers an appraisal to be extremely important to their career goals. Appraisals help employees evaluate and determine how they have scaled with the company. It is also one of the ways for them to know if the employer values their contribution.

First, an organization needs to understand what results they aim at achieving with the process of appraisal. Appraisal is a time when the entire management comes together to discuss the performance of an employee, keeping certain aspects in mind like identifying how frequently the organization intends to perform this exercise and how to make it more effective. 

Management should understand and recognize if the session should be a formal interaction each time that requires documentation manually, or through an online app. Technology is also making appraisals simpler in large companies and can absolutely be applied as it would assist through the process. Organizations need to strategize on how to communicate to employees, in what time period etc. These aspects help an organization decide the end result and also their strategy over time.

It is important to act on the development goals as it shows the value of their findings, the value of the process in addition to the intent of the company. Keeping the process consistent and working on improving it along the way will result in a more effective outcome over time and eventually result in showing clear ROI of the whole process.

Over the years I have seen many instances where I would go through appraisals at the very last moment. This would make us set our goals at the end of the year when the appraisal documents were due. Finally, It did not serve any purpose and we would not achieve the result the company was looking at which was for the purpose of documentation. The purpose of documentation here was to support the organization to fairly evaluate the goals vs the performance of an employee. Ideally, a goal setting activity is done at the end of an Annual Operation Plan, or at Strategy discussions that lay the foundation that it gets done at the beginning of the year. 

Today, we have technology that allows us to have frequent discussions that can be recorded, making it an ongoing appraisal mechanism allowing appreciation or evaluation at frequent intervals. The ongoing format allows organizations to make the necessary changes along the way that would make the process a more effective one also helps in planning strategies to achieve the business objectives.

For an organization to attain a result-oriented appraisal, the strategy should be quite simple. What an organization needs to do is to treat the process just like another project and do what needs to be done to achieve the pre-set company goals. 

Each plan and methodology needs to be aligned towards the readiness of the organization and the pre-defined priorities and objectives that they wish to leverage through the process of appraisal. It is always a better option to have an ongoing dialogue with your employees and having their recorded goals well in advance. Organizations should regularly measure these discussions and development goals that come out of the process.

It is important to act on the development goals as it shows value of their findings, value of the process in addition to the intent of the company. Keeping the process consistent and working on improving it along the way will result in a more effective outcome over time and eventually result in showing clear ROI of the whole process.